Until recently, we all spoke of ham and spam. The two defined types of mail we receive. Good mail came from friends, colleagues and interesting sources. Bad mail came from strangers who tried to offer us millions of pounds held in a Nigerian bank account or questioned our manhood.

However, over the past year, a new grey area has grown out of control. It’s that stuff lodged between ham and spam. It’s lovingly nicknamed bacn, “the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company”, according to Lifehacker.

Our inboxes are becoming giant bacn sandwiches, filled with information you don’t mind receiving but that you don’t necessarily have time to triage right now.

If like me, you also check your email over mobile, dealing with bacn is becoming more problematic by the day. I use the Gmail app for S60, which is great, but only shows 20 new email headers per screen. When most of these are Facebook messages, LinkedIn invites and WordPress comment moderation notices, the real email gets lost. So how do you deal with bacn?

Three steps towards a clearer inbox

1. Get rid of the excess fat

Cut out any mailings you receive that you don’t want or need at all. Whether it’s that knitting mailing list you joined “by mistake”, that newsletter you’ve got little interest in, or those wiki entry modification notices you forgot to turn off, just take half an hour to unsubscribe from anything that isn’t relevant anymore.

You’ve probably joined many social networks in the past few years. Some died, some are still going strong, and some are barely still alive, plugged into an oxygen mask and a shrinking investment budget. I bet you could close your account on a number of these sites right now and not miss them at all.

Be ruthless. Anything important enough will come back onto your radar to be re-added later, so better scrap more than too little. Important news and people will find you if they’re desperate to do so.

2. Consider your options

Almost every social network or mailing list has notification options. Have a look at your inbox and for every automated email you receive from one of these services, consider whether you really need the email. You know, the notification will still be visible on the system when you log in. Do you need that mailing list to spew 45 messages at you a day, or should you switch to receive the daily digest? Can you replace it with an RSS feed alternative?

Is it any use to find out immediately when a random punter adds you as a friend of Flickr? Or can you just find out next time you log in to upload pictures?

Now, this rule is like Play-doh and needs to be modeled to your very unique preferences.

3. “Iz nice thx but is not mah bucket”

You’re now onto the last round. Hopefully, there are only a few lucky remaining bacn rashers left now. It only takes a few networks to spew out a lot of reminders, notifications and invites, and while they’re of interest, they might not be an essential read right now.

No matter what email client you use, odds are you can set rules. These serve as buckets for all the automated emails you receive, leaving you with a clean inbox and the opportunity to check them at your own leisure.
Simply set the rule to move the offending bacn automatically to the correct folder on arrival.

Three simple rules, a tidier inbox.

PS - As an aside, my funny bone was highly tickled by the discovery of Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. Nothing quite like a bacon rasher to soothe an injury!

[* Ahem, need I point out that the designers were not involved in the creation of the image at the top?]

[tags]Bacn, spam, email, inbox, productivity, organisation, mail, taptu, taptology[/tags]

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.